She looked out on the croquet court again through the tall windows, but there was still no sign of her husband. She turned and glanced at the tea tray — oatcakes which Rosie from the village had made that morning and a brown earthenware kitchen teapot which had been brewing on the mahogany drum table for nearly ten minutes. She picked up her pen and finished the letter.
Must stop now. Tea’s getting cold and I’ll have to call him again — he’s so tied up out there puffing away with his old bellows he can’t have heard me the first time.
All love, Madeleine.
She sealed the envelope and moved to the windows once more. Still he had not come, so she went out into the big hall where she was surprised to see the front doors shut and to hear their terrier, Ratty, scratching furiously outside.
She opened half the large door and the dog looked up at her with bruised curiosity. ‘He’s not in the house, silly. He’s somewhere with his bees. Come, we’ll go and find him.’ But the dog seemed unwilling to follow her. ‘Come on, Ratty!’
She walked out onto the columned porch and round to the side of the big square fort house and stood on the croquet court.
‘Lindsay — tea-time!’
She sang the words out, shading her eyes against the afternoon sun which sloped down on her from above the rim of fir trees on a long hill away to the west of the house. The dog stood expectantly by her feet, its nose shivering minutely, smelling the air, head pointed doubtfully towards the woods.
‘Where are you?’ Madeleine called, moving on across the lawn towards the line of oak trees.
A small wind sighed, running down from the wooded hills, through the oak buds, rustling the evergreens and the dead winter grass in the meadow. A bee swung past her head, droning away towards the forest. The bellows smoked on top of the first hive and the breeze caught the smoke and spiralled it gently round her face — a long-remembered smell of corrugated paper slowly burning.
‘Lindsay?’
She moved down the row of trees and came to a hive with its roof off. She touched the felt covers and lifted one corner gently. In the new honey frames beneath she saw the bees for an instant, a furry mass, busily crushed together, starting to replenish their stores with a loud murmur. Two pigeons flapped violently out of the branches above her; a pheasant squawked somewhere in the woods nearby and the little dog whimpered at the end of the walk. It had not followed her and it fidgeted now, chasing its tail, wary of the bees and lost without its master.
She called once more. But nothing answered; no voice but hers in the loud spring.
BOOK ONE
The Puzzle
1
I tried to work again this afternoon, going upstairs to the attic in the cottage which I have made into a study. But from my window I could see the sky, quite blue, almost balmy, for the first time this year, after months of damp and grey — light fluffy clouds sailing over the small hills of this part of Oxfordshire where I have come to live.
But I was impatient again for something I couldn’t touch, something that was surely happening somewhere out there in the world at that very moment, as I sat at my desk thumbing the typescript of the book on the British in Egypt which I’d been working on for the past few years. I had started to read again my chapter on the Suez debacle and its aftermath, a period I’d lived through in Cairo 20 years before. But the writing seemed cold and irrelevant on the page, so far removed from the blazing heat and anger — and yet, for me, the love — of those years: the smell of lime dust and urine and burnt newspapers sweeping up from the back streets of the city: the rumour of sour bread and burnt kebabs that they cooked on a barrow at the corner of my street by the Nile, rising up in the baking air past our open bedroom window, where I lay with Bridget through the hot afternoons, doing the one thing we did so willingly and well then …
I was impatient for that, perhaps — something like that again — some dangerous reality and not this studied history in a calm world: the Cotswolds, where it seemed I’d been asleep for many years. I had felt like Mole all that day: Mole waking on the riverbank that first real day of spring, coming out into the light on the water after the bad dreams of winter, getting his house in order before setting out on his long adventure.
I was not yet tired of country life last Christmas. But now that spring had come and some nameless cure took place in me, boredom had begun, nibbling away at my days, making each of them several hours too long.
The mornings were all right when I worked, and most afternoons when I journeyed over the small hills. But the evenings were difficult. There was no pub in my village, while the one three miles away was empty on weekdays and full of television playwrights and producers at weekends. Sometimes I watched their work on the box at home in the evenings, and that was worse.
The village, quite lost in the folds of high sheep pasture ten miles or so beyond Woodstock, was more than attractive; that quality alone would have ruined it years before. It was inviolate: a manorial hamlet, almost all of it still owned by an eccentric army officer, the last of his line, and rich beyond the dreams of avarice, so that he had no need of weekenders in his village or modern bungalows — and more, before I came, had once taken a shotgun to some intrepid London house hunters he had found admiring a ruined cottage on the edge of his estate.
Nearly all the tied cottages on the single small street had their doors and gable ends painted the same shade of very sombre blue — except for mine, a neo-Gothic, red-brick cottage behind the church, not part of the Major’s empire, but which had belonged to the local sexton and I had bought from the Church Commissioners.
There was a unique fourteenth-century Tithe Barn by the Manor Farm with arrow-slit windows, while the small church, with its dumpy Anglo-Norman tower and ochre-coloured stone was a wonder in slanting sunlight, and considered perfect of its kind.
But I am no rural chronicler: the Bartons, a colonial family, came to live in the old rectory shortly after me; I fell out with them one evening over sanctions in Rhodesia and have barely seen them since. The Major and I have never met at all. But I am not alone in that. He is not a social man. The Vicar, a persistent and over-social Welshman, now from another village, bearded me several times early on, believing me to be a television dramatist, and suggesting I compose a Christmas Masque based on the career of a local seventeenth-century divine whose voluminous and uncollected papers, he told me, were available somewhere deep within the Bodleian Library.
I disappointed him, I’m afraid. Though I still sometimes go to church. The place has a very simple white-washed nave, with the original brick showing through on the window corners, and old pine-box pews that smell of candle wax.